Kathy Sledge has barely stopped making music since she was 13 years old, including with one of the most popular girl groups of all time, Sister Sledge.
The lead voice behind mega-hit “We Are Family,” Sledge has been recording music for decades, but there was one song she “kept on the shelf” until she felt the world needed to hear it.
Sledge and her sisters, Kim, Debbie and Joni— who passed away in 2017— rose to fame in the late 1970s with songs such as “Thinking of You” and “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” when the singer was just a teenager.
She eventually left what she describes as the “original girl group” in 1989 to try her hand at a solo career. Since then, Sledge has dabbled in a wide range of genres, but her new song, “Promise Me,” defies labeling, according to the superstar.
While you can’t put “Promise Me” into a box, it has been sitting on the shelf until now, when Sledge decided the song’s message needed to be heard.
“I feel like I’m watching the generations out there now and I think they want to embrace this nostalgic feeling of what it feels like to be warm and cosy and I think we’ve gotten a little away from some of that,” Sledge told Newsweek.
“I actually wrote this song 20 years ago, but I just revisited it… and I shared it with my daughter Gabrielle, and I said, ‘you know what, Gabs? I feel like this song is like if God wrote a love song this is what the lyrics would because of this space that we live right now’.
“People are so lonely. Like we’re in this huge ocean swimming together alone.”
So the singer decided to release “Promise Me” in September.
“God’s timing is everything,” she said. “Even though I wrote it years ago, I feel like now’s the time that it would be embraced in a way that it may not have been embraced years ago.”
Sledge is no stranger to using her music for good, after all “We Are Family” is an enduring song of human connection and a re-record of the song released in the wake of September 11 was the first charity single after the 2011 terrorist attacks. Its music video was directed by Spike Lee and included famous faces from Diana Ross to Macaulay Culkin. Producer Nile Rodgers, who wrote and produced the original song in 1979, came up with the idea “to commence the healing process,” he said at the time.
The singer even wants Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris to use the song in her campaign ahead of November’s election.
“I do think that our country is in need of ‘We Are Family.’ It’s time,” she told Newsweek. “I feel like we’ve been through a lot of turmoil lately and I think it’s time for our country to embrace each other and that there’s something in the message of ‘We Are Family’ that can help that.”
“I am supportive of Kamala Harris. I think it’s the kind of song to help us; and for our country to embrace each other,” she added.
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